For achieving success with SFDC, there is a need for an effective plan when it comes to entering, cleaning and updating of the data for salesforce.com system. The most popular reasons for CRM system failures point towards poor planning and management of data entry or data quality issue. The data quality challenges faced by the SFDC customers, the respective solutions for those challenges and the best practices will differ depending up on the sales process and size of the company. The implementation of the best practices for data management is vital in creating a competitive advantage and profit with the SFDC investment being made.

How important is Data Quality among Salesforce.com customers?

SFDC has tremendous impact in the sales and marketing functions of a company similar to the services and support functions within a company. Industry analysts have claimed the top most reasons that determine the success or failure of CRM projects is the data quality.

Dynamic Process - Most of the companies across the globe are looking forward for ways that would help them manage sales knowledge delivery in a quicker and efficient manner. The companies feel that they are not able to keep up with the changing market trends even by posting monthly, quarterly and annual information.

Quick Access - There is also a greater need for improvement when it comes to accessing information. The information pulled from several sources needs to be aggregated in a single place in such a way that the linking would be transparent to the sales team member.

Enhanced distribution of knowledge - By means of setting up individual preferences through a user-defined profile, a mechanism can be created for updating the sales people about any major developments in the sales and marketing segment whenever made available to the users.

CRM success driven by end user satisfaction

The sales people were hesitant to make use of CRM applications in the 1990 because of its complex and time consuming functionalities. Extensive research and manual data entry were required to understand the leads, accounts, opportunities and contacts in to the CRM application. All these developments made end user to lose confidence in the CRM applications. However with the introduction of Salesforce, the end users were provided with accurate data with reduced effort and thereby resulting in enhanced end user satisfaction.

Data Quality Parameters

• Record completeness
• Preciseness of data elements
• The overall count of duplicate records
• Determining value based related data elements from the account record
  
  

Data quality issues, challenges and best practices

SFDC provides scalable CRM solutions for small, medium and large SFDC customers through varied data management best practices.

Best practices for small SFDC customers

• Include the present and complete account records at the time of initial SFDC implementation.
• Create accurate account records that are complete and unique by means of licensing deduplication software tools that would help stay away from migrating redundant records in to SFDC, especially when the account data is coming from multiple sources.
• Automating the viewing and saving functionality using one mouse click where in the users would be able to save lead, account and contact data directly in to SFDC.
  
  

Best practices for medium SFDC customers

• Implementation of a data standard for account naming
• Removing the presence of duplicate records using an automated process and thereby helping SFDC customer to manage record redundancy issue for huge records volumes
  
  

Best practices for large SFDC customers

• The common attributes by the customers on areas where the Salesforce related to the products or services is gaining momentum has to be taken in to consideration.
• Those attributes can be then used for determining the goal-oriented market to focus up on and the prospects of that specific products or services towards which customers has shown interest.
• Attributes that defines the prospects usually includes size, industry and corporate linkages etc.
  
  

Janbask is a leading Application Development & Salesforce Consulting Company which provides Salesforce CRM Implementation Services at affordable prices. You can visit Janbask to know more about Salesforce Consulting Services and application development.